Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Well said that man.

Only Nokia phone division was bought by MS.

Perhaps The Company Formerly Known as Nokia (TCFKAN) could make a bundle in cloud services?

If you're earning 35K....

and you've been in the industry for more than a year, then you're probably crap and not even worth that.

Go become a barista or something.

The industry needs good programmers. There is no real use for a "lower tier" of reduced capability players. These are the people that break stuff and leave a mess that more competent, and higher paid, people have to fix.

Re: Um, yes.

Just reducing system failure to "human error" is an oversimplification.

In many cases, the "backup plan" for when a system goes wrong is to disengage and hand over to the human operator to then take control. This really means the system has been designed to hand over control to the operator at the worst possible time. Since the computer has been flying the plane, and the meatsack is largely out of the loop, the hand off seldom provides the pilot with the information needed to take effective command.

There are some functions where a computer performs vastly better than a pilot can (hence the use of computers for stability and thrust control in fighter jets etc). If a computer can no longer effectively keep the plane in the air due to thrust/sbability issues, then a pilot can't either and handing control of a broken system to a pilot is unlikely to save the day.

A further huge issue is the confusion of responsibility between the pilot and the computer. The pilot assumes the computer is doing something, the computer assumes the pilot is. Nobody does anything and the plane crashes.

That is what caused the AF447 crash. Three pilots in the cockpit flew a plane from 30-odd thousand ft into the sea in a deep stall because they believed the computer would prevent a stall. This took minutes to unfold, during which the plane displayed all the symptoms of being in a stall (mushy control etc) and the stall warning was sounding.

Both automatic and human control can operate well when flying straight and level. Problems happen during the transitions from one control to another, the blurring of responsibility and the confusion of the control surface.

You run IE on Windows??

Who cares.... it's an IE bug. Just run FF or Chrome or whatever.

This is hardly going to cause people to upgrade to Vista. They'll just switch browsers.

Thank the sky fairy that pigeons and squirrels are free.

Re: "He likes pizza and R&D. Presumably not together"

Pizza and R&D do go together. But REAL nerd-food pizza.... with Jolt cola.

Not pretentious proscitto ham pizza. That's what marketing eat. Just one slice though... with mineral water.

From the accelerometer?

You might be able to get a reasonable idea by using dead reckoning with the accelerometer.

MS have pissed in their own soup

"What Apple have become to the consumer, MS are aiming to be for the enterprise. This is going to be a very interesting decade or so."

This "give them a chance" attitude is bollocks. MS have had their chance and blown it. Don't forget that MS have been in the phone space for twice as long as Apple and Google so they really don't deserve breathing room for beginners.

At one stage (early 2000s), Microsoft had the corporate phone biz sewn up. They then did nothing for a long time.

Roll on to 2008 and they bought Danger Kin (a kiddy phone) from which they then extracted the DNA to make all the TIFKAM crap.

Enterprise wants boring, beige tools that work. They don't want TIFKAM on their phones or desktops.

Can you really be enterprise centric when you call some of the OS features "charms"? Sounds more like a Pink Pony OS for 8 year old girls.

"In the electronics world, even high end test gear that costs thousands is not immune to having a few little bodge wires put on at the factory or a different revision of the board used part way through the product's manufacturing life."

If anything, it is more common for the high end test gear to have blue wires etc.

On the cheap high volume stuff you cannot afford to do the extra hand work so you respin the boards.

On the more expensive low margin stuff it is cheaper to have someone fix the issue.

Some years ago, we bought a new emulator for HP (it made test kit back then). There were about 5 boards inside - all had extensive fixes to them.

Re: Parasites

If you really thought the purpose of quantitative easing was to help the mom & pop companies, you're severely deluded.

For every dollar that is helping "middle America", ten are going into shenanigans like this.

Fake sceince science too

While you focus on corporations being hostile to science in the interests of profit, you can just as well apply that to anyone with a vested interest.

That includes scientists.

Pretty much all scientists have a vested interest in their area of research, because that's where their funding comes from and at the end of the day that is what puts food on the table and a car in the driveway. It is ridiculous to expect scientists on a pedistal. They are the same as any of us.

While the scallywags at the EAU Climate Research Unit show this in spades, we see this in pretty much all areas of research.

Two days ago I listened to some research scientist spouting on about unlocking the honey bee's genetic code to make pesticides that kill everything but the honey bee. Sounds good to the people that believe the honey bee is the thing that pollinates all our food. The scientist, an entimologist, must surely be aware of the truth: many different insects pollinate our crops - honey bees are just one of many. Killing off other insects is as bad as killing off the honey bees.

The BOFH said it needed a firewall

The boss called the builder...

Re: The russian record != the record

"Inexplicably, many Russians of a certain age miss Stalin."

Not inexplicable at all... you just explained why!

Many of the people who fall through the cracks in post-communist USSR miss the comfort and certainty of the old system where they would have had a crappy job, but at least a job, and knew there wasa powerful force setting the agenda.

Prisoners face the same issues on leaving prison, soldiers feel it when they leave the military. Many black people in South Africa even pine for apartheid.

Re: iSuppli estimates

"The same is true in any hardware company. ". Nope, you are wrong.

I've been in the embedded systems industry for 30 years, of which I worked for a year at Apple.

Engineering is the art of compromise. Many of those compromises are things like speed vs amount of RAM, cost of FPGA vs cost of microcontroller. Engineers need this info to make good design trade-offs.

Most companies share this information within the company so that engineers can use it in their decision making.

Not Apple. People with very real reasons to have access to numbers, even ballpark numbers, don't get them.

Value

"The actual value of a Bitcoin is the amount of 'leccy used to obtain it. "

Err, no!

The value is only what someone is prepared to pay for it. The leccy cost just sets a point at which it is no longer economically feasible to mine them. The myth seems to exist that that value is linked to the energy required to generate it, but that is not so.

To use od economics: the leccy is Cost Of Good Sold (COGS). When you can sell something above that, you make a profit. When you sell something below that, you make a loss.

There are numerous unprofitable companies selling product below COGS. They tend to go broke and go out of business.

Bitcoin is a fantastic wheeze, COGS starts off tiny (virtually zero) and gets more. As a result, we're about half way through the BC number space and the COGS has gone up to $500. That means the people that kicked off the whole game:

a) risked almost nothing

b) made a stonking profit if it took off.

Re: Protect?

s/the rich/itself/

If you think the NSA acts on the whims Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Prez Obama, you'd be severely wrong. The NSA will have eprobes into these people's lives.

NSA has become like the KGB of old - completely above the law and any government oversight. They become paranoid: anyone outside the organisation becomes the enemy.

Obama thinks he can reign them in with strict guidelines etc, but he is wrong.

The only way the NSA can be managed is to shut them down, investigate the hell out of them, and criminally presecute those that have not done. Half measure won't do it.

Re: ARM vs x86?

"Wouldn't this necessitate a re-write of OS X, considering the A series are ARM processors and Intel are x86?"

Not really. I would expect there have been skunk-works projects to do this anyway.

The underpinnings of iOS and OSX are the same: both use BSD and Mach under the hood. The UI stuff and apps are surely reasonably portable too.

Remember that until 10.7, OSX supported both PowerPC and x86, some of that was done through emulation and some through executables that included both PowerPC and x86 code.

Nothing technical holding it back...

Re: COBOL and Reverse Polish notation (not really!)

If anything, Python has the worst punctuation.

The python punctuation is whitespace and impossible to see. I've had python code mangled by editors, emailing and the like which took ages to fix.

At least if C code gets mangled it is reasonably easy to fix with a pretty printer.

You can't tell where it went

You can just tell that it is authentic.

Criminals and money launderers would not use it as an anonymous cunnrency if you could tell where it came from or where it went.

Wrong search term

GPS is the name of the US system.

What you want is the more generic GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) of which GLONASS, GPS and GALILEO are examples.

Then there are the local service variants such as the Chinese and Indian systems. These are cheaper to deploy since they require fewer satellites and less ground stations.

Why is the EU thing taking so long to get going? Bureaucracy. The satellite doesn't launch until the paperwork weighs more than the launch vehicle.